Engineering Interest - Spring Works

 Spring Innovation Fund builds and backs new companies that advance animal welfare through technology, science, and venture-scale entrepreneurship.

Spring Works is our in-house engineering division.  We design, prototype, and welfare-validate the devices the field needs but no vendor supplies, then hand them to the companies we launch for deployment at scale.

The work is electromechanical.  These systems run continuously, in water or on land, operated by farmers and processing crews rather than by engineers.  Some deliver precisely controlled electrical stunning.  Some drive industrial equipment: conveyors, pumps, motors.  All of them must survive wet, dirty, remote environments—often with limited power or connectivity—and keep working without anyone on site to babysit them.  They also must hit a price a farm will actually pay or a nonprofit can subsidize, because an unaffordable device won't get deployed.

The systems must also prove they are being used and are working.  Every system we build will monitor its own activity and report telemetry back to Spring, because a welfare claim is only as good as the evidence behind it.  That means electronics, PCBs, and firmware smart enough and robust enough to run unattended in the field and connect back when possible.  It also means people who can define what "worked" means in the first place and measure whether a welfare intervention delivers the intended gain.

Roles we expect to hire, opening at different times as programs come online:

Mechanical and electrical engineering - enclosures, mechanisms, actuation, power electronics, high-voltage and high-current design.  Hardware that survives the field and is manufacturable at lower costs.

Firmware, embedded systems, and cloud - microcontrollers, cameras, sensor integration, low-power and intermittent-connectivity design, fleet management, and the telemetry pipeline behind it.

Welfare science and validation - experimental design to validate welfare interventions, converting welfare research to practice, sensing and measurement, and turning welfare outcomes into data that holds up to outside scrutiny.

Lab management and operations - wildcard role; keeping a fast-moving lab organized and running smoothly and could include equipment and experiment maintenance, vendor, material, and supply management.

We are especially interested in people with mission alignment, intellectual honesty, grit, and the ability to operate in ambiguity.  Relevant backgrounds may include aquaculture and fisheries equipment, ocean sensing/monitoring, agtech and livestock systems, industrial automation, medical devices, robotics, consumer hardware, internet of things, animal welfare science, animal behavior or veterinary research, effective altruism, or early-stage hardware startups.

You do not need to fit a conventional profile.  If you are motivated by the mission and think you could help build this, we would like to hear from you.